More and more chefs are supporting the claim that fine dining is dead. It's over. It's kaput. Now, I've had my own restaurant for 10 years and I achieved a Michelin star and I was rated amongst the world's 50 best restaurants for several years. I was there. I saw what happened to fine dining in those years. But I believe we're asking the wrong question. You might have seen my earlier videos on the topic. You know that I'm not in love with fine dining, but it's not because I never have been. I absolutely love fine dining. I spent many years of my life working in top restaurants. But something happened. Back when I started cooking at age 17, I could not tell the difference between a great restaurant and a luxurious restaurant. That's basically because it was the same thing. Okay? And I loved it at the time. I loved the opulence, these incredible fine dining establishment. I dreamt of working with the ducasses of the world and as much because of the cooking as I as much because I just admired that sort of exclusivity that they had to them. It was all thick tablecloth and chandeliers and gold and all that. And I'm I'm working class. I was not brought up seeing these things. And I was kind of vibing with it honestly. But this was when I didn't understand the power that gastronomy had and how little it had to do with the setting and the luxury of it all. So things changed as I worked in the world's best restaurants. I was at Elbulli in 2006 in 2006 and it was a place that I believe for gastronomy did many things but mainly also it just created a different expectation towards the chefs as being somewhat of an artist. You know, Fanadria was at Documenta Castle and he was he was really shaping a persona out of the chef that I believe was was not been told before, at least not to the same extent. Then I was at NMA and I what I believe NMA really did was at least to me it opened up the kitchen. So when I was at Elboui, I had no access to the restaurant. I saw no diners except the ones coming in to take the pictures with fan. Obviously, what I saw was the machine, the machinery, the machine room, and what was the dining room, but something way beyond my reach. That was the same thing that I experienced at the Taiwan when I was before, which was also a three mission star restaurant where I sted as well. So, what NMA did was that it placed me because I started as a sue chef there in 2007. It placed me next to the head chef at the pass plating, but it was an open kitchen where you looked out and saw the whole restaurant uh around you. It broke down the walls in a way where you as a chef had overview of the restaurant, but you also were expected to sort of engage yourself in it. And I've not before that understood to the same extent the way that the whole restaurant experience was being shaped. Like I was moving away from just getting getting a plate done in a certain way and sending it out. And I had understood to really follow the guest experience because as you would stand there in the kitchen, you would see people and you would see whether they would react positively or not on the food. While Farane gave the chef some sort of intellectual weight that the chef had something to say that the chef could have an opinion about the restaurant. What I found at NMA was that now I had also the opportunity to shape my own opinion about what a restaurant was supposed to be like. It gave me a process from which I could learn what kind of experience that I want to offer myself, what kind of restaurant that I want to create. This is why I believe that NMA and New Nordic in general brought to the public something very new to the fine dining restaurant experience. It changed the approach on how you would meet the guests and it would make it much more sort of eye to eye, much more egalitarian to some extent. I think it makes sense that this is something that happened at in in Denmark where you don't have a big belief in authority in Denmark. There's no formalities when talking to officials or older people and so so it comes very natural to not be so caught up in you know the class differences that are often displayed at a table in a in a restaurant. So the front of house as the chefs would talk to people in a much more sort of um approachable uh humane, welcoming and I think also personal way because what I find happens with the sort of very American style service where you are uh overly polite all the time, I think it becomes a little disengaging and a little too um superficial to be honest. So Norma's contribution to all of this was that the understanding that you made as a chef of what the restaurant experience could be like became validated and it became something that you could maybe try and achieve on your own, which is exactly what I tried with my own restaurant. I opened my own restaurant in 2010, Relay, but it was a chef's restaurant. It was an attempt of creating a restaurant for myself, for who was like me, who had the interest that I had, and with the sort of genuine wish to create a place that would allow who worked in the restaurant to exit out the back door and come in the front and be as guests. and the the the split between being a guest and being a and being an employee would be small. So, Relay was intended to be like all fun for a chef. No fussy, no stuffiness, no no uh white tablecloth, no unnecessary sort of decorum, no I didn't like it. I didn't want it and I didn't need it and I didn't want to provide it to the guests. And I think that it became a limitation for the type of restaurant we wanted to create, but I think it very much created a unique experience for people that had similar values to me. Now, why were these things possible at the time and possibly not today? Why is it different than today? Well, as they say, it's the economy, stupid. In Copenhagen in 2010, the middle class was on fire. There was the economy to back up uh an experience economy, a sort of I believe that a lot of the middle class was looking for something fun. But that somehow was more relevant because after the financial crisis, the sort of overly luxurious caviar riding experience was not well seen. The same way, you know, you had to you had a more frugal approach to everything. And having a good dining experience didn't mean fleshing out a ton of money. When I worked at NMA, the menu was a little over €100. Now, the menu was shorter than it's become over the years. Yes, it was a seven course menu. The relay menu started off at 40 to 45 for the four course menu. I didn't even want to do more than a four course menu. In the end, we did because that was a request, but the setting was very different. Today noma is in the €500 600 per menu but it's not there and tab by buno that has now recently announced that he closed his restaurant despite being rated the world's third best restaurant on the world's 50 best restaurants list. People cannot afford eating in a restaurant that cost you 56 €700 for just getting through the menu. That was not the case in 2010. A high-end fine dining restaurant could provide you a interesting, fun, intellectual to some extent, artistically inspired to some extent, experience at 100, €150, €175. You still had the very big French restaurants that charged you your shoes, but that's a different type of fine dining restaurant. You can make the case that the dining experience has improved 10fold in those years that there's a reason behind a high cost is because the experience is greater. But I find that the proportion between the cost and the experience is just off way more than it used to. Now, if the Noma experience or eating at another three Michelin starred very high-end supposedly creative restaurant is now at the 5 and600 because of the improvement of the experience and the raising cost that that entails, I just don't believe that all of those costs have been worth it because the prices have completely pushed normal middle class people with a cultural interest in cooking and gastronomy out of the room. They don't have access to that kind of restaurant anymore. And it makes very little sense for me that have many years of experience within the restaurant industry and that have an understanding of cooking at a certain level. I cannot spend 10,000 crona or let's say €1,500 on eating out for two. It's just not possible. It makes little sense. Why would people go? But the reality is that the very highest echelon of diners, the globe trotting elite, people that fly all over a filthy ridge, they can follow up on that. And the demand is there because we are so connected as we are. The creative landscape is created by the middle class. It's where the fun is not at the very very today. The economy is in a very very different place. Restaurants are facing increasingly higher fixed cost, food cost and wages cost. Everything has become so much more expensive. Though with the wages, let's say not in the same proportion as everything else, they have also made it more difficult to run a restaurant. So, the high-end ambitious restaurants, the ones that take up all the attention, they have been in an arms race within the last 10, 15 years, fueled by the world's 50 best restaurants where they have become increasingly more expensive, and exclusive because they are competing at a global level with people that have so much money invested in that type of restaurant. So on one hand you have the interesting fine dining restaurant becoming more expensive and at the same time becoming less interesting because it's become much more about indulging in experiences and making when you make things catering to the riches of the riches that have access to everything and are numbed by their access to everything. This is where the experience become over the top and kind of pointless and meaningless. So if you today are like I was in 2010, young, full of energy, full of good ideas, some good ones at least, and you want to go out there and make a restaurant that then you yourself will be owning and operating and at the end harvest the benefits from. If you ever manage to make that into a fruitful business or any profit will come out the other end, what you're facing is a world that the very very very top is completely detached from the rest of the world. But a so-called great world-class experience is backed by a lot a lot a lot of money and a very very very high target price, a high ticket price and you cannot compete within that range. So what I find is that what I live through in the that decade was the fun era of fine dining. It was the era of the sort of I call it the chefled independent restaurant. Restaurants that had both the elbow room to just f around a little bit, make things fun and interesting, but also the responsibility to make things sustainable in a way for the long term. are not overly complicating or making things too crazy for no reason. I think that error is done. This is what I think we should question is what is fine dining today? Is it relevant? I don't think fine dining is dead. I just think the fun is dead. It's no longer fun. It is back to what it used to be back in the day when I was 17 and I was looking into what I thought was great visionary restaurants which were just luxurious temples catering to the most rich French people out there with sort of cultivated highly cultivated taste and today we're back at doing that same thing because that camp is split in two the very very very expensive restaurants are split into doing things that are just about indulgence and exclusivity, which comes at a very high price, or overly sort of creative, artistic, to me, fairly meaningless things that are serve to just slap people that can no longer feel a culinary experience with their pallet and their eyes and the smells and their presence in a restaurant because they've had everything to adnauseium. They can't do anymore. They don't give up. So everything has to be crazy crazy crazy. In the end we have to ask ourself what is the purpose of all of this? Bruno Vu of Tabler restaurant in Paris shut down the restaurant claiming fine dining is dead. Why? Because despite being rated third restaurant in the world by the world's 50 best restaurant list, he could not make ends meet. They charge €500 for the menu. It is a great privilege to be among the world's best restaurant because it fills the restaurant every day but it fills it with people that we don't have any connection to and it makes everything extremely expensive. And then comes the question that I believe we should ask. What are we teaching the next generation? Because what is the point in working in the best restaurants in the world if what they do cannot teach you a viable business that you can live by the rest of your life? If the system is broken, what can you learn from it? I closed my own restaurant Relay in 2020 because I felt that my time chasing novel ideas because I felt that that was what was expected of the restaurant and therefore of me was just tiring me. It was not fun anymore. It wasn't adventurous. It was about, as Marco P said, it was about defending. It was not about creating. That was almost half a decade ago. I don't even know what people have to go through today to create within a restaurant a setting that they can channel their creativity into and have some fun doing it. And more than anything, by the end, make some money that can make you survive. Bruno closed his restaurant and he claimed fine dining is dead. I believe the big problem is that the kind of restaurant cannot support the people that are willing to do the work. It cannot support the people that are mad enough to open that kind of restaurant with time. What happens when the when we keep catering towards the very exclusive top is that the independence of the small restaurant becomes more and more difficult to obtain because the fine dining restaurant becomes more and more owned by groups and more and more heavily invested or something that is heavily invested in because it's more and more prestige project. It's always been that way, >> but I don't see room for the independent chefled restaurant, which I believe is the number one provider of great culinary experiences. That's the kind of restaurant that I would want to fight for because the big big big big big completely financially unsustainable ego projects are not making gastronomy any more interesting. They're just making it